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Mon, Jun 25, 2012 His road to fame began in 1960 when Ralph Rinzler, a musician who also managed Bill Monroe, discovered Watson in North Carolina. That led Watson to the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and his first recording contract a year later. He went on to record 60 albums, and wowed fans ranging from ‘60s hippies to fans of traditional country and folk music.
According to the Encyclopedia of Country Music, Watson took his nickname at age 19 when someone couldn’t pronounce his name and a girl in the audience shouted “Call him Doc!”
Seven of his albums won Grammy awards; his eighth Grammy was a lifetime achievement award in 2004. He also received the National Medal of the Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1997.
“There may not be a serious, committed baby boomer alive who didn’t at some point in his or her youth try to spend a few minutes at least trying to learn to pick a guitar like Doc Watson,” Clinton said at the time.
Folklore described Watson as “a powerful singer and a tremendously influential picker who virtually invented the art of playing mountain fiddle tunes on the flattop guitar.”
Countless guitarists have tried to emulate Watson’s renditions of songs such as “Tennessee Stud,” ‘’Shady Grove,” and “Deep River Blues.”
Doc Watson’s son Merle began recording and touring with him in 1964. But Merle Watson died at age 36 in a 1985 tractor accident, sending his father into deep grief and making him consider retirement. Instead, he kept playing and started Merlefest, an annual musical event in Wilkesboro, N.C., that raises money for a community college there and celebrates “traditional plus” music.
“When Merle and I started out we called our music ‘traditional plus,’ meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play,” Doc Watson is quoted as saying on the festival’s website. “Since the beginning, the people of the college and I have agreed that the music of MerleFest is ‘traditional plus.’”
Doc Watson has said that when Merle died, he lost the best friend he would ever have.
He also relied on his wife, Rosa Lee, whom he married in 1947.
“She saw what little good there was in me, and there was little,” Watson told the AP in 2000. “I’m awful glad she cared about me, and I’m awful glad she married me.”
In a PBS NewsHour interview before a January appearance in Arlington, Va., Watson recalled his father teaching him how to play harmonica to a tune his parents had sung in church, as well as his first bus trip to New York City to perform in the early 1960s. He gave an early solo performance at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, a hot spot for the folk music revival, and later played Carnegie Hall.
Telling the stories in a folksy manner, he broke into a quiet laugh at various points. He said he still enjoyed touring.
“I love music and love a good audience and still have to make a living,” Watson said. “Why would I quit?”
Musician Sam Bush, who has performed at ...

Sun, Apr 22, 2012 Kentucky in 1817. “Can a merciful Jehovah sit on his throne and view the sufferings, the tears, the prayers of those desponding slaves?” he asked.
His brother, Sam Ward, the founder of Newport — or Marine City as we know it today — did not hesitate to hire blacks to work on the steamers built at his shipyard at the mouth of the Belle River.
Nor did Eber’s son, Eber Brock Ward, who was sent to work as a cabin boy in a schooner at age 9 after his mother’s death.
“By the time he was full grown, he knew everything about a ship from keel to flag, and had bought a small vessel of his own,” historian Herbert Newton Casson wrote in his 1907 study of the early American steel industry. “For years he continued to buy ships, or build them, until he became the steamship king of the Great Lakes.”
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THE YOUNGER WARD and Thompson became fast friends, and they swung into action when a Southern slave hunter came searching for an escaped slave who worked as a chef on one of Ward’s boats.
Ward bought his employee’s freedom and helped the chef raise the money he would need to buy the freedom of his enslaved wife and children.
Jenks said it was Thompson who traveled south, paid for the chef’s wife and children, and then escorted them to Michigan and a life of freedom.
(Page 4 of 5)
Thompson also played a role in the anti-slavery struggle of Bleeding Kansas, as the strife-torn territory became known in the 1850s. Jenks said Thompson helped recruit and arm a company of fighters from the East to fight pro-slavery forces in Lawrence, Kansas.
His old neighbor, John Brown, bloodied his hands in Kansas. It’s what inspired his audacious plan to steal weapons from the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which he intended to use for a slave insurrection in Virginia.
Brown came to Chatham, Ontario, about 30 miles from Marine City, to recruit volunteers for the Harpers Ferry expedition. It would not surprise me to learn that Thompson joined Brown there, although I can find no documentation of it.
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IN THE PRESIDENTIAL election of 1844, James Birney of the abolitionist Liberty Party received a single vote in St. Clair County. Thompson proudly boasted that vote was his.
Birney, a Kentuckian who moved to Bay City in the early 1840s, received less than 3% of the vote nationally. Even so, many historians believe he swung the election from the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, to James K. Polk, a Democrat.
If so, it changed history. Clay opposed the annexation of Texas and the...

Sun, Mar 25, 2012 Marcia Sue Brosh Lewis, 70, of League City, Texas, passed away Monday, March 19, 2012. She was born Oct. 6, 1941, in Covington, Ky, to Charles Brosh and Ruth Proctor Brosh. Marcia was raised in Newport, and attended William Woods College in Fulton, Mo. She moved to Houston, Texas in 1969 and raised her family. Marcia began her career in nursing in the Houston and Baytown areas and finished her career with Dr. Edward Leahey. She enjoyed crafts, sewing, scrapbooking, collecting dolls and as an accomplished piano player, Marcia enjoyed music of all kinds. Her true passion, however, was ...

Sun, Mar 25, 2012 Baptist Church in Sturgis.He retired from Paramount Furniture Company in Sturgis following 19 years of dedicated employment. Before joining Paramount he had been employed for 42 years by Sturgis Newport Business Forms until the business closed and he had also worked for Lane Northern Well Drilling in South Bend, Ind.
Mr. Samuels was proud to have served his country in the U.S. Army during World War II with the 3rd Battalion 395th Infantry 99th Division from Dec. 4, 1942-Dec. 27, 1945, earning the rank of Private First Class. During his service in the U.S. Army he was awarded the American Theater Ribbon, EAME Theater Ribbon with three Bronze Stars, Good Conduct Medal, Purple Heart, Distinguished Unit Badge and the World War II Victory Medal.
He ...

Tue, Jan 31, 2012 Rhode Island with three feet of snow.
“Nearly every day, if I’m out someplace, people will say, ‘Where is your shirt?’ ” Mr. Garrahy told the Newport Daily News for the 25th anniversary of the blizzard in 2003. “I always tell people tongue in cheek, in eight years as governor I did a lot of great things, but the only thing people remember is my shirt.”
As governor, Mr. Garrahy worked to clean up pollution in Narragansett Bay, modernized the care of children with developmental disabilities and launched new programs for elderly residents. He also led efforts to attract high-tech businesses to the state and preserve undeveloped open spaces for recreation.
John Joseph Garrahy was born in Providence, R...

Thu, Jan 5, 2012 Lazarus’s roots were in elite Sephardic Jewish families who were leaders of the first synagogues established in New York, Philadelphia and Newport, R.I. Moses Mendes Seixas, Lazarus’s great-great uncle, welcomed President George Washington to the Newport congregation Jeshuat Israel in 1790 and presented him with a floridly written letter, on display here, praising a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Those words were used almost verbatim by Washington in his response, one of the nation’s first affirmations of religious liberty.
Lazarus’s great-grandmother Grace Mendes Seixas Nathan is represented here by a notebook of 19 poems, from about 1830, demonstrating a talent not unrelated to Lazarus’s own. And her cousins included Associate Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo of the Supreme Court and Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College. Lazarus, born in New York City in 1849, must have been able to take many things for granted; few could claim a more distinguished association with the United States or with the Jewish population within it.
She must have also been something of a prodigy. Her father published her first book of poetry before she was 18. And though some lines are dewy with Romantic mannerism, the compilation was impressive enough for the 65-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson to welcome an association with this young poet. (“I should like to be appointed your professor,” he wrote to her, “you being required to attend the whole term.”)
It is difficult to sort out the peculiarities of that eccentric relationship, along with several others in which Lazarus combined an acolyte’s submission with prideful assertion. But her ambitions led her to the heart of American literary culture. She visited Walden Pond with Thoreau’s biographer, William Ellery Channing, who presented her with Thoreau’s compass. Walt Whitman’s biographer, John Burroughs, showed the older poet her work (which he praised).
Lazarus also found a place in salons, including a Newport-based club overseen by Emily Dickinson’s mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The exhibition design evokes a weekly New York salon, where a couple who were Lazarus’s lifelong friends, Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, Helena, held court. We learn too of Lazarus’s European travels, where she met Robert Browning, Henry James and William Morris.
“Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles” is on view through the end of 2012 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place, Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan; mjhnyc.org.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 3, 2012
An earlier version of this review misspelled the surname of Esther Schor as Shor.

Wed, Jan 4, 2012 If some new venue tries to copy or replace this feeling, I don’t know if I can ever accept it.
There are rumors that Southgate House’s management and staff are opening a new venue in Newport, with the house receiving renovations. The Mad Hatter is slated to reopen under a new name and owner. I’ve been following the news and rumors swirling around both venues since they arose and began to take shape, but I still cannot pin down my feelings. On one hand, I agree with legendary local musician, David Rhodes Brown, who said that it is not a building that creates a community, but the people within it. But at the same time, both of these venues are symbols of years of the formative period of my life. I grew up in both of these places and to see them change in any way, shape, or form is terrifying to me. I don’t know how to let go and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to do so completely. The owner of Bangarangs (Mad Hatter’s replacement) has stated that they hope to run the establishment better than the Hatter, with several improvements on policies on everything from moshing to pricing. And Southgate Houses’ staff seems excited about the new venue, leading me to believe that big things could be coming down the pipe very soon. But with so much of the situation being untested and uncertain, all I’m left with right now are memories of over half a decade, taking place in venues that will cease to be in a few short days.
No matter what the outcome is, however, I will always have my memories: the highs, the lows, the sadness, and the joy. When the final, last call rolls around on New Year’s Eve, I’ll lift my glass to all that was and hope that there is still more to come. If these venues mean anything similar to you, please do the same. Our memories will guarantee that neither venue will every truly die.
(A shortened version of this essay ran in CityBeat's "Year in Film and Music" issue, Dec. 21)
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Sun, Jan 1, 2012 Sean Collins, who created Surfline.com, whose forecasts and real-time views of beaches reach 1.5 million surfers a week, died on Monday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 59.
Jason Murray
Sean Collins in 2002 in Huntington Beach, Calif. His business, Surfline, provided up-to-date information on surf conditions.
While playing tennis, he had a heart attack, his business partner, David Gilovich, said.
Before Surfline, dedicated surfers would hang out on the beach for weeks at a time, dropping everything, including work and relation... (New York Times)

Thu, Dec 29, 2011 Covington club The Mad Hatter has already shuttered its doors and the Southgate House in Newport is closing on New Year’s Day.
And I can’t quite bring myself to accept that.
In high school, I was the token weird kid. Some of my peers flourished on the football field, in the classroom or in the school theater. But for me, I was the kid who listened to the loud music but didn’t have the musical skill to play himself. Going to a small, private school in a Cincinnati suburb, this inclination was met with every sort of response, usually in the realm of confusion. It’s not that I didn’t fit in; it’s just that I w...

Wed, Dec 21, 2011 Mr. Summers to try his hand as a developer. Together they opened an office in California, where over the next few years they renovated several hotels, including the Biltmore in Los Angeles and the Newporter Resort Hotel in Newport Beach. When Ms. Lambert returned to her native Montreal in the 1980s, Mr. Summers moved to France, where he pursued painting and sculpture. In 1989, he followed in Mies’s footsteps by becoming dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, a position he held for four years.
After he moved to California, in the early 1990s, he continued painting and made bronze furniture. He once said he saw an advantage of making furniture over architecture: “You don’t have to talk to clients; you don’t have to talk to employees. It’s all your own hands.”
Gene Summers was born on July 31, 1928, in San Antonio, the son of Frank and Etta Summers.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children, Blake, Scott and Ali Summers and Karen Lowe, and eight grandchildren.
Asked in 1987 why he and Mies got along so well, Mr. Summers speculated that, as a Texan, he talked so slowly that Mies, a German émigré with halting English, could understand him.
(New York Times)